I sat at lunch today with a good friend of mine. We both come from dysfunctional families, yet the difference between us seems to be that he’s managed to disentangle himself from the feelings of guilt, and I have not. Maybe it’s because he’s older, or maybe it’s because he’s a man that he’s able to do this more easily than I am. He clearly loves his mother, but he has consciously made a promise to himself to not give into her emotional manipulation. Why is that so much easier said than done?

My uncle e-mailed me when I told him what was going on with my parents. He said to me, you just need to say, “yeah, yeah, yeah” to all that nonsense because you know her accusations aren’t true, and recognize that they cannot and will not change their criticizing ways. The only thing you can do is to control the way you respond to it all. It seems to be a common piece of advice from both friends and professional sources, but it will clearly be an ongoing challenge.

The older I get, the more and more I realize how complex feelings can be. When we are children, everything seems so simple. We are happy or sad or angry. We feel confused or determined or apathetic. As we get older, all of these feelings seem to interweave amongst themselves, and it becomes more difficult to just say we feel one emotion or another.

Maybe I’m not meeting or spending time with the right people, or maybe it’s because people want to simplify things in an attempt to avoid a genuine understanding, but I’m having that feeling again that no one understands what I am trying to say.

I had a friend over for dinner tonight who I just became reacquainted with over the last few months. My mom was spending the night at the hospital with my dad, for what will be his ninth and hopefully last night there before getting discharged, so I had the house to myself for once. I was expressing to him what an arduous endeavor it’s been being back and my constant feeling of emotional and physical exhaustion, and I said that it’s even harder without my brother around. He asked where he was.

That’s when it hit me that I never told him about what happened to Ed.

I told him the condensed version, and of course, he was shocked and had a pained look on his face as I described the situation. I expressed anger and frustration with my family, and he expressed empathy towards them and their lack of understanding of mental illness.

I don’t know why, but while empathy is always something I value greatly, an empathy towards this always seems to infuriate me.

It’s not as simple as a blame game, or feeling like if they understood or tried harder to understand that maybe Ed would be here today. It’s also about taking responsibility and realizing that someone needs help, and we need to give it. It’s about understanding the vulnerability of a human being to criticism and pain. It’s about realizing it’s not always about ourselves and how an action or state of being will reflect on us and acknowledging it’s about the person next to you.

Every time I tell the short or long version of “where is Ed now,” I feel pain all over my body. I don’t like talking about it, but I want to be open about it to increase awareness of the types of pain and suffering that human beings go through and that these are not isolated experiences. I want to make sure Ed is not forgotten and that he is constantly acknowledged and part of my life. I get irritated when people say, “You don’t have to tell me what happened – it’s okay,” even though they are saying it partly half because they don’t want to cause me more pain, and of course, half because they may not want to really know. I hate being afraid of the truth, so I want others to know the truth.

I spent the night with my dad in his room at the hospital last night and woke up every hour or so when a nurse or lab technician would come in to check on things. As I was getting up this morning, I felt the deepest wave of respect for both of my parents. All I’m doing in life right now is working and taking care of my dad part time temporarily, and I’m already completely worn out. I have no idea how they took care of my grandma while she was sick in 1995, took care of me and Ed, and also did both of their full time jobs.

I went to the bathroom and stared at myself in the mirror. All I could see was a blotchy face, flat, greasy hair, dark circles under my eyes, and what appears to be a new indent on the right side of my face, marking the fact that I am aging along with my parents. I’m going to be 29 in two months. Ugh.

My mom and I spent an excruciating five hours waiting for a call or page from the surgeon to let us know the status of my dad’s coronary artery bypass surgery today. Within less than 45 minutes of bringing him into the pre-operating room, the pager goes off, and I immediately feel sick, wondering, why would they be paging us so soon? Has something already gone wrong?

Apparently, it was just the surgeon and the anesthesiologist who wanted to meet with us beforehand. Thank God.

The surgery officially began around 2pm, and then at about 6pm, the surgeon calls us in the waiting room and informs us that the surgery was a success. My dad’s heart was strong the entire time, and he anticipates a very smooth recovery. I can’t remember the last time I felt more relief. I think my mom felt a bit more calm once my aunt joined us in the waiting room.

We saw him for a bit in the ICU, but he hadn’t woken up yet. My aunt and I went home while my mom insisted that she stay with him overnight. His room was too small, so the nurse asked her to stay in the waiting room.

After I got home, ate dinner, and got ready for bed, I realized that this was the first time I’d ever slept in this house by myself. There were times when my brother was away for a trip, but there’s always been at least two other people in this house sleeping at night when I’ve been home. I felt this deep pain when I looked over at my brother’s bed, knowing that he wasn’t here with us today. The entire day today felt weird without him. It’s like I expected him to be there in the waiting room, but he wasn’t. The other part of me thought, he’s out there somewhere, so why haven’t I told him myself about our dad’s surgery? When is he going to come back?

It doesn’t feel like he’s really gone, and it made me miss him even more today. Realistically, I know it would have been really hard on him, probably even more so than on my mom and me because he tends to get the brunt of our mother’s wrath, particularly in trying situations like this, but I still miss him and wish he were here. Times like this will just be a constant reminder to me that his life ended too soon, and that from now on, I will need to deal with all of our family life events all by myself.

My dad never admits fear. He’s that stereotypical man. He always wants to seem like he is in control, like he knows what he’s doing and there’s no possible way he can be wrong. As you can imagine, that hasn’t really made any of our lives easier because we’ve butted heads quite a bit. I guess that’s what happens when you are stubborn and your dad is even more stubborn. Oh, and then your mom beats both of you for stubbornness.

We were on the phone today and I was explaining to him all of the things I’ve read about this coronary artery bypass surgery and what the recovery was going to look like. I also told him things that one of his doctors explained to me. These are all the things you need to expect, and these are all the things that you need to do to ensure a speedy recovery, I said. I asked him how he felt, and my dad hesitated and said, “Well, there’s just a fear of the unknown.” He wouldn’t fully say he had a fear of the unknown, but it’s my dad’s way of opening up and communicating to me that he is scared.

This is one of those moments in life we have when we get older, and we realize that although our parents are our parents and they are older, in these situations, it’s almost as though the tables have turned. Now, we have to take the responsibility to be the parents and they have to be the children. We have to take care of them and ensure that they don’t worry and going to be just fine.

I’ve been spending the last three days in Tampa for work and was unlucky in not being able to get a direct flight back to New York. I connected in Miami tonight — my first time in the Miami airport, and it certainly lived up to Miami’s shiny and glitzy image.

My mother’s been worrying ever since I let her know on Monday afternoon that I was on my way to the airport for this trip. She hates it when I have to fly for work, especially when she knows I am traveling alone and to a city that I’m not familiar with. It’s even worse when my flights are at night (like this one), and she knows I will be riding in a cab from JFK back to my apartment alone. She called three times this afternoon to see where I was, and I was finally able to call her when I reached Miami.

“You know your mommy loves you very much, right?” she said on the phone today.

It sounded as though one of us was going to die soon.

“Yes, I love you, too,” I responded. “Don’t worry!”

“I know you think I am crazy and worry too much, but I worry about you when you do work travel. I only have one daughter. You are my baby girl,” my mom said tenderly.

I’m not sure what happened in that moment, but I suddenly started tearing up when she said that. I just felt this deep, sinking sensation because it occurred to me that yes, she only has one daughter; she only has one baby girl. And she used to have one son, her baby boy, and now he’s gone. Where did he go, and why did he have to go?

It doesn’t matter how old we get; we’re still our parents’ babies – at five weeks, at five years, at 50 years. No parent should ever have to bury her child. My parents know what that pain feels like. And even though Ed is my older brother, it still feels like in many ways, I had to bury my younger brother – my baby.

Over the last year and almost four months, I’ve realized that even the strangest things trigger emotion in me. The most harmless, normal things suddenly make me remember Ed and all the devastation I felt when I knew we lost him. Most of the time now, when I think of Ed, which usually happens multiple times throughout every day, I think of our happy moments together when we talked about things that were meaningful, when we had good food together and walked to places together. I think of how much he loved me and showered me with affection. I think of all the things I tried to do to help him get better… even though I failed. A lot of me has healed, and much faster than I thought. I am doing my everyday things again like my workouts, my job, reading, cooking. But I know that a part of me will never get over him. It’s like being permanently damaged, always wondering what you did wrong and what you could have done differently to prevent such damage from happening.

Today, I got an e-mail letting me know that one of the mentoring programs I signed up to do is being delayed — for the second time. It was initially scheduled to begin in mid-October. In October, I was notified it would be delayed to mid-November. Now that we are at the end of October, we’re being told it will begin sometime in January, and that the lead apologizes for the delay but hopes the wait will be worth it.

And when I went to the AFSP Walk event on Sunday, not only did no one know where the walk signs were, but no one knew where the photos where of the people the walk was being done in honor of. Chris had to run around to look for the sign that said “In Honor of” my brother’s name, and the photo with his name on it. Not only that, but when I went to sign in after already pre-registering online (hence, having an online donor drive), when they got to the page with the last set of last name W, the page was missing! I told them that I’d raised over the minimum for an event t-shirt, so they gave me one anyway. And if they didn’t believe me, I’m sure I could have pointed to my name on the “Top Fundraisers” sign.

I can’t really blame non-profit organizations for being disorganized — they are underfunded and under loved, and very likely completely under staffed and over worked. The worst part is knowing what they are trying to achieve in the world relative to all these for-profit organizations, and how little they get compared them.

I’ve been really grateful for all of the donations and support I’ve received for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention Out of the Darkness Walk fundraising I’ve been doing. While I know that not everyone cares that I am doing this, nor does everyone care that I lost my brother to suicide, I’ve been trying to focus on all of the positive aspects of this endeavor — the fact that people are willing to talk to me about this (like my colleague who has dealt with suicide in his own family), and the fact that others are willing to donate and reach out and say encouraging words. These are all things I appreciate a lot. For those who don’t reach out or say anything or donate or help in any way… well, that’s fine with me as long as they know I don’t care about them, either.

Today, I had an annoying interaction in the kitchen with a colleague I am Facebook friends with (because that is now a type of “status” in life now thanks to Mark Zuckerberg). I was preparing my tea this morning, and this colleague walks by me and says hi, and says, “So I saw that you did that walk over the weekend.” I responded and said, yes, it was yesterday. He goes around the corner and leaves the area. He never comes back. To make sure he knew I knew he was being a jerk, the next time I saw him a bit later, I said with a smile, “You still have until January 1st of next year to donate!”

Sometimes, it’s fun to be a jerk, especially when others are jerks to you first.

One of my best friends is living in Singapore with her husband’s family, and she just told me that her husband’s paternal grandmother passed away on Tuesday after a number of health problems. She was 88 — seems like a nice, long life to me since no one in my family who has passed has even successfully made it past 80. As per the cultural tradition, the four days following her death are a long wake, during which family and friends come and pay their respects at all hours of the day to view her body. Someone from the family has to be there (and awake) the entire time, so the close family members take turns staying awake until the day of the funeral, which is this Friday.

There are so many cultural traditions around death in the world that are so diverse and complex. I know I probably couldn’t personally handle most of them. One of the traditions Chris told me about was that in Maori death custom, if a mother passes, her daughter must stay with the dead body for 48 hours straight.

When I heard that, I thought, I don’t even think I could go even a fourth or a fifth of that with Ed’s.

Shortly after Ed died last year, my uncle sent me a book to help me grapple with my feelings called Staying on Top When Your World Turns Upside Down. The book is about how to deal with traumatic life experiences while getting stronger in the process. It’s written by a woman who is not only a stress psychologist, but has also gone through her own experience of prematurely losing her younger brother to a very preventable disease at the age of 22.

I finally decided to open it today, and I’m about one-third through it. I think I’ve gotten to a point in my grieving where I’ve gone through all of the stages she describes and am pretty much at the final stage, which never really ends until you die. But there’s one point that she makes in the book that I’ve never actively thought about before:

“Extremely stressful life events rob us of our masks, the devices that ordinarily shield us from the fact of our own death. So, when our life undergoes upheaval, not only do we suffer from the losses that are associated with that specific trauma, we quake at the reminder that one day we will lose our most precious possession–our very own life. It is important to realize that the terror of trauma gives us a great opportunity to resolve the primordial fear we all experience.”

I’m not sure I immediately thought about my own life and how I could die when my brother died. What I did think about, though, was how short life really is. We think of it when we are young as being long and full of potential. I’m 28 years old now, and I cannot believe time has passed by this quickly. I can’t believe I’ve been in the full-time workforce for over six years now, I can’t believe that I have friends who are married, getting married, and having babies, and I can’t believe over a year and two months have passed since I lost Ed. The last time I ever saw my brother, he was saying goodbye to me at the airport in San Francisco, and I gave him a long, tight hug. I didn’t think then that that would be the last time I’d ever see him alive. Every time I think about that last glimpse and feel of him, I feel a sick feeling in my throat even until this day. I was touching him then, and now, he’s gone forever. Things pass us by too quickly, and sometimes I feel like I don’t have enough time to actually enjoy it all.

I don’t want to have the attitude that I just need to survive, though. I want to feel like I’m doing more than just surviving each day since my brother’s passing. I want to feel like I am actually thriving and doing something meaningful. I don’t know if I will ever be able to do enough to fully feel like I am preserving him, though.